


shattered glass

by lulla_lunekjaer



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers for Brave New World, and then I have some emotions, doug dreams and it's Not Good, feat. me having to use spell check every time I try to spell "Hephaestus", heavy spoilers, i finally get to use that tag, probably gross misuse and ignorance of tenses in here but it's getting late and I don't care, then they watch Star Wars and it's more Not Good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:32:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13243491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: Some things remain. Maybe. He's not sure, but there's something.





	shattered glass

**Author's Note:**

> I've been having a lot of feelings and reading a lot A LOT of Wolf 359 fic and this happened.

When you drop a jar, or a bottle, or a lightbulb, or anything glass, really, it shatters, and the contents are - ignoring the law of conservation of matter - gone. It’s all gone. The thing is, we can’t ignore the law of conservation of matter, or of energy, or momentum, or charge, or even memory. The shards are there, and whatever remains. Drops, maybe. Shattered glass.

The point is, there’s something there. Doug can feel it. Reneé will say something and he’ll laugh and stop because oh. He knows that person. He’s laughed at that before. _Déjà vu._ It’s French for “already seen.” Reneé speaks French, he thinks. Maybe he would know. Maybe he had known. Doug remembers that Eiffel didn’t even know Reneé was married. Maybe he wouldn’t have known.

And then there are the dreams.

Sometimes he thinks they might be his memories, those shattered pieces. Sometimes he thinks it’s just the tapes, that they’re giving him false images. Regardless, he dreams about his past.

Usually it’s Hera the Hephaestus mother program -

_Officer E-Eiffel, have you tried the blue dial on panel 4_

\- that fades into Hera the house that he lives in:

“Doug, wake up. You’re dreaming again. You asked me to wake you up, remember?”

Sometimes it isn’t Hera. It’s Minkowski, and she’s yelling about a Plant Monster and then, suddenly,  about the Tony Awards, and he’ll never get over the fact that she likes musical theatre, and he wonders if that’s him thinking that or his past self, from the tapes.

Sometimes it’s Dominik, which is reassuring. He’d never met him before Dominik picked them all up from a hospital, he hadn’t known him, hell, according to the tapes he hadn’t even known he’d existed for almost two years. When it’s Dominik, he knows it’s just a dream.

They watched Star Wars. Reneé insisted. It was his favorite, he knows that from the recordings.

The worst part is, he loves it. He also knows he can never watch it with the others. It doesn’t matter that there was no sound in space, that the Hephaestus fell into Wolf 359, that the blasters don’t sound like the guns that killed Maxwell, that failed to kill Lovelace, that shot Jacobi and Minkowski. When it comes down to it, it’s Star Wars. Even the name contains the two things most likely to trigger one of them. Any of them, except Doug.

They don’t even show the machine that tortures Leia, but at the mention and the clicking sphere that the old Eiffel had felt was comical, Lovelace begins to go grey. Dominik begins to rub Reneé’s back. Even Daniel looks like he’s having second (third, fourth, thirtieth) thoughts. The red sun sets over Tatooine. The _Millenium Falcon_ is in it’s too-familiar constant state of disrepair. Han shoots first. The more he thinks about it, the worse it is.

“You know,” he tries to say, after Obi-Wan is killed, “You don’t have to watch it with me. It’s fine if you want to leave.”

No one answers. They also don’t leave.

The credits roll.

It was amazing. He feels terrible.

Doug gets up, takes out the DVD. He puts it back in its box. He goes back to his room.

“Hera,” he says, looking up at her speaker (some things are muscle memory, and he still has muscles, at least), “I think maybe I should watch the rest of them on my own.”

“I think,” she replies, “that might be a good idea.” (Hera has already downloaded and watched everything that she remembers Eiffel ever telling her about, and a few more things that he hadn’t. She has made the executive decision that they are never watching _The Martian_. She has also decided that Eiffel can sit and wonder about the plot hole that is C-3PO not remembering the prequels. They’ve all had enough of memory wipes and restraining bolts for several lifetimes.)

Doug wakes from a dream that is, mercifully, about some weird board game - “Funzo,” he thinks it was called - and thus, can’t be about the Hephaestus at all. It is 4:45 am, and there’s no chance of him going back to sleep, so he goes downstairs to get some coffee. He’s about to open the kitchen doors when suddenly, he hears voices.

“Did you know that the beep-language that the first generations of AI used, that Rhea used, were based on R2-D2?” It’s Lovelace. Isabel. He doesn’t know which name feels stranger on his tongue. Eiffel had called her “Captain,” almost exclusively.

“No, I hadn’t.” Reneé, her voice soft. Doug had forgotten that they went running together when they couldn’t sleep.

“I had almost forgotten what she sounded like. And yes, before you ask, she had just as foul a mouth on her when she was annoyed. I remember one time - “ Lovelace sounds sad. He wonders whatever happened to Rhea. Decommissioned, he thinks, if Hilbert or the Hephaestus or Wolf 359 or Goddard hadn’t killed her before everything had happened to Lovelace and her crew. Erased, he thinks.

Isabel Lovelace had wondered the same thing when she had met Hera, but it had make her think of Eris. She was the only one left now to remember either of them.

Doug slips back upstairs without his coffee. There’s plenty more, after all, and it can wait.

Daniel Jacobi has slept lightly for months, if he’s being honest. He’s trained himself to sleep without snoring.

He’s waiting for Doug at the top of the stairs. Doug quirks his head, like a puppy. Daniel nods towards Doug’s room and follows him in. They sit there, on Doug’s unmade bed, finger lengths away from each other. Close enough to touch. Daniel gets up and draws the curtains. They wait for the sun to rise, yellow and bright, and when it does, it will be brilliant.

The shards of broken glass are there, as sharp as anything else in Doug’s life. They will always be there. But there are also new jars, and he’s ready to fill them with whatever he can. 

**Author's Note:**

> One of my goals is to write something every week this year, and post something at least once a month, so here we go, I guess. I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> I'm also on tumblr @mizeliza


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